Sara* can't remember a time in her life when she wasn’t on a diet. In fact, growing up in her Orthodox Jewish community, trying to lose weight was as routine as any other ritual. “The same way we had Shabbos [the Jewish sabbath] every week, we had dieting every day,” she tells SELF. “It was always a part of my life.”

While Sara, now 25, says pressure to diet and lose weight came from various family members, the emphasis on being thin seemed to stem from a deeper, core obligation in the Orthodox community: getting married.

“It's a very cultural thing to need to be thin for dating. Even if you're not thinking about dating when you're a five year old, there's an immense amount of pressure to think about your size for [future] dating,” she says. “[They think] if you're chubby when you're five, it will be hard to grow out of it, and you're going to be a fat 18 year old.”

According to the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of Orthodox Jews and 75 percent of Haredi (the most traditionally observant) Jews in America marry at the age of 24 or younger, compared to 33 percent of the overall population of Jewish Americans.

Though research on the subject is limited, it seems that disordered eating and body image struggles have become prevalent—yet not fully acknowledged—parts of growing up as an Orthodox Jewish woman.

Data on eating disorders within the Jewish community, and especially the Orthodox community, is nearly impossible to find. A 2011 New York Times report cited an unpublished 1996 study of an Orthodox high school in Brooklyn, where eating disorders among girls in the school were reported to be about 50 percent higher than the national rate at the time. The Times also pointed to a 2008 study of 868 students in Toronto, which found 25 percent of Jewish Canadian girls aged 13 to 20 suffered from clinically diagnosable eating disorders, compared to 18 percent of non-Jewish Canadian girls in the study sample.

But much of what we know about disordered eating in the Orthodox community comes from anecdotal evidence. Sarah Bateman, a licensed social worker who is the liaison to the Jewish community for the Renfrew Center, one of the oldest eating disorder treatment institutions in the country, tells SELF that her professional interests stemmed from what she witnessed at her own Orthodox school. “I was in high school and noticed so many of my friends were suffering,” she says. “What struck me was that everyone seemed to know about it and no one was talking about it.”

That statement can certainly hold true in secular societies, too; but it's possible that the increased emphasis on marriage and the specific dating culture may exacerbate disordered eating among Orthodox women.

While Orthodox men are not immune to suffering from eating disorders (just as they aren't in the secular world), the pressure to woo the opposite sex often falls on women because of what's known within the Orthodox community as the “shidduch (matchmaking) crisis,” or the perceived courtship imbalance caused by an excess of available single women. Based on a widespread belief that there are too many single women (whether that's true or not) single men are treated as the high-demand prize.

“There is undeniably a certain amount of pressure in some circles where…the women have to prove themselves and have this pressure to find a man and get married,” Bateman says.

Many Orthodox families still rely on shadchans (Yiddish for matchmakers) to formally introduce men and women to each other. And shadchans often rely on "resumés" of women—a list of information about her upbringing, family, schooling, and even references to vouch for her character—to give to men (and often their mothers) to determine if they should meet for a date. But other questions are asked about the prospective girl that aren’t listed on the paper.

In the past year alone, numerous Orthodox women have revealed to Weiss-Greenberg that they've been told, "Maybe if you'd lose 20 pounds, you'd be married."

"It happens on a very regular basis,” she says. “There are people whose parents encouraged them to get liposuction or other plastic surgery to conform to a certain body, to [increase] their chances of getting married."

Bateman agrees: “I hear from matchmakers over and over that the number one question men are asking is, 'What size is she?' or, 'Is she thin?'” And, according to Weiss-Greenberg, not only is the weight of the prospective date of interest, but “people ask the weight of the mother because [they] want to know what [their] future wife will look like.” Ironically, this focus on women's shapes and sizes proliferates even though Orthodox dating itself doesn't allow for physical contact between the sexes.

Currently, Sara is in the thick of the Orthodox matchmaking world. Even though she’s a professional fitness trainer, because she is not textbook thin (she described herself as “a plus-sized woman” to one matchmaker), she is regularly told she should lose weight to increase her marriage prospects.

“I have definitely gotten, ‘You know, if you lose weight, it will be easier to find guys who will go out with you,’ ” she says. “Do I get less dates because of that? One hundred percent. But that's fine with me. I do believe most women are trying to lose weight in response, [though].”

Others in the community point to changing mainstream beauty ideals—not strictly matchmaking culture—as the driving force behind disordered eating among Orthodox women.

“In the times of the Talmud, there's an example from thousands of years ago that women would wear choker necklaces…to accentuate the fat on their neck, so that they would look healthier, heavier, more affluent, and more attractive,” Devorah Levinson, a referral specialist and the director of eating disorders at Relief Resources, which helps Orthodox Jews find culturally and religiously sensitive mental health services, tells SELF. “If we fast-forward to post-World War II, to be thin was to be sick, so [mothers] wanted their Jewish daughters to look heavier. The system of shidduchim [matchmaking] has remained pretty much the same throughout—but what has shifted now is the vision of beauty.”

Levinson argues that the unhealthy focus on thinness is a testament to the power of mainstream media images. She points to how “ubiquitous the thin ideal is that even in this insular community these messages have come across—even with people who don't have television and don't have access to the internet, this message of [the] thin ideal has seeped in so deeply.”

Complicating the issue further is the stigma associated with being treated for a mental health condition—particularly when it comes to future marriage prospects for Orthodox women.

In the Orthodox community, not only can size hinder one’s marriage prospects, but so can the stigma of having received treatment for an eating disorder. That fear ran through Shelli's* mind when she began formal treatment for her bulimia. Now 29, Shelli tells SELF that after struggling with the disorder on and off since she was 17, it hit her again in her early twenties when she was going through a divorce. “It was my coping mechanism,” she says. “I was thinking, 'No one is ever going to want me because I don't even know how to eat food. I don't know how to deal with food. How is anyone going to want me if I'm like this?’”

Shelli says she told her now-husband when they were dating, and, though surprised, he was very supportive. For years after their marriage, though, she did not disclose her long bout with bulimia to his family.

“Being Orthodox and struggling with this or any kind of mental illness in general is a very scary thing, because you think you're going to be excluded from the community and that people are going to judge you—and sometimes, people do.”

Shelli has started sharing her experiences not only with her family, but as a volunteer speaker for various eating disorder groups. However, she says that she still keeps a “low profile” within her own community, admitting that some of her good friends don’t even know about the eating disorder in her past.

“It's a huge struggle, and it's not just about 'I want to be skinny,' ” Shelli says. “It's really a much bigger issue than that, and it needs to be dealt with in an open, loving, and caring way.”